Droplet dynamics: evaporation, hydrodynamics and particle transport
Alexander Wray (Strathclyde)
The evaporation of droplets has been a much-studied problem in recent years, finding applications everywhere from the spraying of pesticides on leaves to diagnostic applications of blood drying. Many of the most critical industrial applications, such as the printing of OLED screens, involve arrays of droplets with polygonal footprints in close proximity to one another, resulting in complex interactions via the vapour phase. Unfortunately, the theoretical literature has thus far only treated droplets with circular or elliptic footprints, and even then, only for such droplets in isolation. Similarly, existing models in the literature ignore effects such as asymmetric flow profiles, particle diffusion, and substrate deposition. We discuss recent advancements in this area relaxing all of these constraints, demonstrating how arbitrary arrays of non-circular droplets may be analysed theoretically. We examine a variety of industrially relevant problems, including the evaporative behaviours of rectangular droplets (used for OLED screens), as well as a continuum formulation designed to cope with the extremely large arrays observed in 8K screens (O(10^8) droplets). We briefly discuss the uses of these solutions in other physical contexts.
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